There’s an unrelated/related topic to this: people who want to be heard doing something. They themselves won’t do much, so you can expect the royal “we” to be tossed around a lot.
> If no one asked and no one is on the hook to change anything: Stop talking.
It seems like a matter of knowing who to talk to about what. I don't think the solution is to stop talking to everyone.
Presenting a rationale for something worthy of addressing (need/problem/opportunity) needs to be communicated somehow, and convincingly. In person, in writing, or a simple business case.
From my non-tech background, priorities are fluid, and things that are rationalized as urgent and important are given resources and attention.
If there is someone like the author spinning wheels in frustration, then maybe there's a problem with the organization aligning everyone on goals/objectives/outcomes -> leading to misaligned solutions being raised, and deaf ears. Or, maybe there's no opportunity to raise solutions with the right people.
Everyone can talk and give opinions. The real question is if you can actually make a difference. I tell people there's a gap between knowing how to do something and actually doing it. And that gap is a big part of our engineering skills.
If I'm not going to change something, I'd rather not talk or give opinions.
I’m in the situation the article is talking about where I’m both suggesting advice and willing to do the work. But it requires me to have some allotted time and the boss says we don’t have the resources even 1 hour a week.
It’s like we’re moving chopped wood from the forest to the village and I suggest building a wheelbarrow but the boss says what we don’t have time for that we gotta move all this chopped wood. It’s crushing to have a job that could be very interesting but the tooling and processes sap all of that out.
Bad idea. I want people working around me to notice, be uncomfortable and especially speak up if something is amiss. Unless you work in a malignant environment, this should be normal behavior.
Based on the results (not to mention the Green Mile "I'm tired boss" look on most people's faces), I'd imagine most workplaces are malignant environments.
Absolutisms like this are challenging to strike right because an establishment of context is needed. This post's sentiment sounds like regret and resentment over past events (there is trauma), and the author knows to not put their hand on the stove.
Sometimes not speaking up is the best thing for future situations. Other times, it's too costly to not speak up, and what should follow is the speaker making right by their words: action.
It can be helpful to flip the lens from critic to creator. Instead of asking "what's wrong with this thing" instead ask:
Who deserves praise?
What spark here deserves to grow?
What new thing am I trying myself?
Who left today better because I showed up?
What's something I (personally) could have improved?
What mistake or new facts have I learned from/ widened by view?
This person is being unfairly categorized in multiple posts as someone just complaining and wanting others to do the work but this person is suggesting actionable steps to take to improve things with evidence supporting why and still getting shot down and wasting their time. I’m in this exact situation right now.
> This person is being unfairly categorized in multiple posts as someone just complaining and wanting others to do the work but this person is suggesting actionable steps to take to improve things with evidence supporting why and still getting shot down and wasting their time.
Yes. And? If the actionable steps and evidence you prepared are getting shot down, i.e. not getting the outcome you desire, then you are doing something wrong (and wasting your time). You can't control other people's actions, only your own. You can sometimes influence others, but if that is your goal the current approach is clearly not working and you require a different one.
In many companies (especially in non-tech departments) there’s a culture where the first person to speak up is given credit for an idea as the “visionary”, even if they have no skills to actually implement it. In those environments, speaking loudly and often allows one to “lay claim” to an idea. This can be beneficial as a way to control workload, if you “claim” the idea first, you can control people’s expectations and timelines around building it.
Strategically, “stop talking” means nothing unless you would otherwise be slamming out ideas. You don’t need people who don’t talk, we have plants for that. You need your silence to say something.
I get it. This is roughly me, I don't always have the best answers, but I know most things can always be done better. I've coined a few different terms over the years such as "marketing driven development" when I wind up working in places where the marketing team is driving the devs off a cliff, and pushing new features at the expense of ever having time to deal with technical debt. The industry really needs "Tech Debt Thursdays" or something.
There's always way more work to do and those key enhancements or research stories that could improve everything get deprioritized.
Have you ever heard the phrase "man your battle stations"? Turns out in the US Navy there is also "cleaning stations" and there is a call for all hands to cleaning stations on the regular. I have proposed something similar on a few teams I've been on. Daily won't work and quarterly is too long. The problem is the sprawl that comes from cleaning up things that have unintended side effects. But yes, paying the interest on the tech debt needs to be normalized across our industry.
There's also in some places 'Friday Afternoon Projects' (also known as FAP iykyk) where you're allowed to work on anything, I'd honestly prefer companies allow me to work on whatever I want once a week so I can put energy into tech debt items, and tools that might make everybody's lives easier.
As of late, I've been thinking about how "debt" may not be the right metaphor.
Fiscal debt is a one-dimensional number that becomes higher or lower from some offset, but it can't change direction. There's no "complex numbers debt."
But software engineering is only one-dimensional if your problem domain is so constrained that the only roadblock to execution is time-at-keyboard, and that's rarely the case in most software (especially startups and hacking). I've too often seen that debt just "evaporates" when the company pivots or the entire system is replaced by another system or rendered completely irrelevant to continue accepting the notion that debt works as a metaphor. Even in the small, too often I've seen things flagged as, for example: "debt - we should consolidate these two pipelines on top of a smaller set of helpers" only to see the use of the pipelines diverge over time such that it turned out to be a great first step to keep them separate and duplicated.
Sometimes things to be improved / cleaned up are obvious, but cleanup assumes taking disorder and making order out of it, and that requires us to know what order even looks like.
> The difference between “annoying senior sysadmin” and “good consultant” is often just whether you’re in a room that opted in.
So much that. No one likes "drive-by advice" - if you want something to be fixed, there should be a person responsible for that. Maybe it's you doing all the work, or you convincing management, or management who is asking for an advice... But if you are just saying "we should fix FOO by doing this and that" with no plans as to whom those "we" are, it's only annoying.
A big problem I see constantly is the mindset that it's "wisdom". It's audible in the voice every speaker that thinks it true. No matter when it's said, no matter how many self-aware disclaimers precede it, it comes out annoying as hell (e.g. Lex Fridman). Some people, even when they know they're are doing it, can't stop themselves.
Communication bandwidth is a finite resource, as several years of managers have reminded me.
(Although, it's worth noting that in this era of more remote work, perhaps a little more read-in and context is useful to avoid burning time on back-and-forths that used to take minutes in front of someone's desk but can now take hours over Slack).
what this misses (and unfortunately is not always an option, especially in larger orgs) is that instead of talking (read: complaining), just fix the damn thing and present the solution on a platter (on company time, of course). more often than not, if you've already addressed the issue and it's ready for primetime, people will not refuse the change.
if they do, there's an equal chance that you either didn't understand the situation to begin with, or you work in a team with poor leadership and strategy. learn from the former, leave the latter.
This is terrible advice that will hurt your career progression. The problem isn't that people speak out too much. It's that basically no one is proactive enough to speak out. In my experience the people who speak are the people who get promoted.
Knowing when to shut up is great advice and knowing how the wind is blowing. If I know their is an edict from the top down to be an “AI first company”, no matter how much I disagree with an initiative that comes from on high, I’m going to shut up and be all in.
“The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.”
The last time I worked for a product company was as at a startup where I was the second technical hire by the then new CTO who was building up the technical staff internally. The founders bootstrapped the company through an outside consulting company.
There I had a relationship with the CTO where I could just say “that’s a really bad idea” and he would listen.
Fast forward a few years and I was working for a shitty consulting company, I kept my head down for a year, let them fail after I was sure they wouldn’t listen to me and started interviewing and only stayed a year.
My career progression isn’t dependent on the job I have at the moment.
It may benchmark well, but in the wild none are much better than coin flip. A quick Google search shows that Pangram's weakness is "false positives on creative writing", and that it's trivially fooled.
By having native English language proficiency and an IQ above 100.
This isn't even particularly good slop. If you can't identify this, we're entering a not so good space.
Anyhow, I'd recommend you roll away from this hill because it's really not worth dying on. Common sense and peer reviewed slop detection aren't working for you. I provided my opinion and backed it with evidence. That's why I posted what I did.
Yes, it is, 100%. One does not even need an AI detector; it's obvious from the first sentence: "brought a lot of context, more scars, and more pattern recognition." "Like a lineman sees a frayed cable." Lol. This is the sloppiest slop there is.
But you got downvoted for pointing out that it was slop. I got similarly downvoted a couple days ago. Hackernews folk seem uninterested in having it pointed out when AI is being used to generate posts.
I'd guess it's some combination of a) they like using AI themselves, and b) they can't distinguish AI themselves. And they turn to all manner of excuse like "AI detectors do not work" or "non-native speakers need a way to produce articles, too". It's a crappy time to be a humanist, or really to care about anything, it seems.
That might be because the thing is whole-cloth generated from AI, but given that the author has a .in email address, it also might be that English is not their first language but they want to reach a broader audience with their message so they used AI to translate it into the lingua franca of modern technical and scientific discussion (which is, this is always funny to me, not franca).
AI generators do a better job of conversational output than traditional language translators (although there is a risk that if you can't read the target language as a non-native speaker, it can distort or destroy the message).
As someone struggling to learn a second language, I would have a lot more sympathy from someone using bad incorrect English than someone passing off AI Slop as their own.
Regardless, presenting AI generated content without the disclaimer *I AI GENERATED THIS CONTENT. IF YOU THINK MY MOST LIKELY BRIEF AND LOW-EFFORT PROMPT JUSTIFIES YOU READING POTENTIALLY LARGE AMOUNTS OF AI OUTPUT, CONTINUE* as if it's worth reading is something a lot of people aren't okay with.
I actually find it an insulting imposition on my time. I don't think this is unreasonable or even unusual.
There’s an unrelated/related topic to this: people who want to be heard doing something. They themselves won’t do much, so you can expect the royal “we” to be tossed around a lot.
> If no one asked and no one is on the hook to change anything: Stop talking.
It seems like a matter of knowing who to talk to about what. I don't think the solution is to stop talking to everyone.
Presenting a rationale for something worthy of addressing (need/problem/opportunity) needs to be communicated somehow, and convincingly. In person, in writing, or a simple business case.
From my non-tech background, priorities are fluid, and things that are rationalized as urgent and important are given resources and attention.
If there is someone like the author spinning wheels in frustration, then maybe there's a problem with the organization aligning everyone on goals/objectives/outcomes -> leading to misaligned solutions being raised, and deaf ears. Or, maybe there's no opportunity to raise solutions with the right people.
I know some people that need to apply this advice. Majority shouldn't, this is just a mitigation for a specific personality trait
Everyone can talk and give opinions. The real question is if you can actually make a difference. I tell people there's a gap between knowing how to do something and actually doing it. And that gap is a big part of our engineering skills.
If I'm not going to change something, I'd rather not talk or give opinions.
Related: https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...
I’m in the situation the article is talking about where I’m both suggesting advice and willing to do the work. But it requires me to have some allotted time and the boss says we don’t have the resources even 1 hour a week.
It’s like we’re moving chopped wood from the forest to the village and I suggest building a wheelbarrow but the boss says what we don’t have time for that we gotta move all this chopped wood. It’s crushing to have a job that could be very interesting but the tooling and processes sap all of that out.
Aye, someone full of ideas for other people to take ownership of isn't actually being helpful (unless that's explicitly their job)
This is a better way to say it.
Talking at the right place at the right time on the right topic is.
Bad idea. I want people working around me to notice, be uncomfortable and especially speak up if something is amiss. Unless you work in a malignant environment, this should be normal behavior.
Based on the results (not to mention the Green Mile "I'm tired boss" look on most people's faces), I'd imagine most workplaces are malignant environments.
Absolutisms like this are challenging to strike right because an establishment of context is needed. This post's sentiment sounds like regret and resentment over past events (there is trauma), and the author knows to not put their hand on the stove.
Sometimes not speaking up is the best thing for future situations. Other times, it's too costly to not speak up, and what should follow is the speaker making right by their words: action.
It can be helpful to flip the lens from critic to creator. Instead of asking "what's wrong with this thing" instead ask:
This person is being unfairly categorized in multiple posts as someone just complaining and wanting others to do the work but this person is suggesting actionable steps to take to improve things with evidence supporting why and still getting shot down and wasting their time. I’m in this exact situation right now.
> This person is being unfairly categorized in multiple posts as someone just complaining and wanting others to do the work but this person is suggesting actionable steps to take to improve things with evidence supporting why and still getting shot down and wasting their time.
Yes. And? If the actionable steps and evidence you prepared are getting shot down, i.e. not getting the outcome you desire, then you are doing something wrong (and wasting your time). You can't control other people's actions, only your own. You can sometimes influence others, but if that is your goal the current approach is clearly not working and you require a different one.
In many companies (especially in non-tech departments) there’s a culture where the first person to speak up is given credit for an idea as the “visionary”, even if they have no skills to actually implement it. In those environments, speaking loudly and often allows one to “lay claim” to an idea. This can be beneficial as a way to control workload, if you “claim” the idea first, you can control people’s expectations and timelines around building it.
You give way too much credit to what happens in “tech companies”. All companies over a certain size are dysfunctional. It makes no difference.
Strategically, “stop talking” means nothing unless you would otherwise be slamming out ideas. You don’t need people who don’t talk, we have plants for that. You need your silence to say something.
[dead]
I get it. This is roughly me, I don't always have the best answers, but I know most things can always be done better. I've coined a few different terms over the years such as "marketing driven development" when I wind up working in places where the marketing team is driving the devs off a cliff, and pushing new features at the expense of ever having time to deal with technical debt. The industry really needs "Tech Debt Thursdays" or something.
There's always way more work to do and those key enhancements or research stories that could improve everything get deprioritized.
I didn't RTFA - just responding to you:
> Tech Debt Thursdays
Yes, "Fix it Fridays" is another alliteration.
Have you ever heard the phrase "man your battle stations"? Turns out in the US Navy there is also "cleaning stations" and there is a call for all hands to cleaning stations on the regular. I have proposed something similar on a few teams I've been on. Daily won't work and quarterly is too long. The problem is the sprawl that comes from cleaning up things that have unintended side effects. But yes, paying the interest on the tech debt needs to be normalized across our industry.
https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/display-news/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyJH8VbFE6g
There's also in some places 'Friday Afternoon Projects' (also known as FAP iykyk) where you're allowed to work on anything, I'd honestly prefer companies allow me to work on whatever I want once a week so I can put energy into tech debt items, and tools that might make everybody's lives easier.
As of late, I've been thinking about how "debt" may not be the right metaphor.
Fiscal debt is a one-dimensional number that becomes higher or lower from some offset, but it can't change direction. There's no "complex numbers debt."
But software engineering is only one-dimensional if your problem domain is so constrained that the only roadblock to execution is time-at-keyboard, and that's rarely the case in most software (especially startups and hacking). I've too often seen that debt just "evaporates" when the company pivots or the entire system is replaced by another system or rendered completely irrelevant to continue accepting the notion that debt works as a metaphor. Even in the small, too often I've seen things flagged as, for example: "debt - we should consolidate these two pipelines on top of a smaller set of helpers" only to see the use of the pipelines diverge over time such that it turned out to be a great first step to keep them separate and duplicated.
Sometimes things to be improved / cleaned up are obvious, but cleanup assumes taking disorder and making order out of it, and that requires us to know what order even looks like.
Most problems have been solved except the ability to align incentives.
Until the desired outcome is defined and documented, holding off on solutions and effort would benefit both parties.
I'd say - Stop proposing strong solutions until either the room is ready, or you've found or founded the right room
> The difference between “annoying senior sysadmin” and “good consultant” is often just whether you’re in a room that opted in.
So much that. No one likes "drive-by advice" - if you want something to be fixed, there should be a person responsible for that. Maybe it's you doing all the work, or you convincing management, or management who is asking for an advice... But if you are just saying "we should fix FOO by doing this and that" with no plans as to whom those "we" are, it's only annoying.
> unsolicited wisdom
A big problem I see constantly is the mindset that it's "wisdom". It's audible in the voice every speaker that thinks it true. No matter when it's said, no matter how many self-aware disclaimers precede it, it comes out annoying as hell (e.g. Lex Fridman). Some people, even when they know they're are doing it, can't stop themselves.
Communication bandwidth is a finite resource, as several years of managers have reminded me.
(Although, it's worth noting that in this era of more remote work, perhaps a little more read-in and context is useful to avoid burning time on back-and-forths that used to take minutes in front of someone's desk but can now take hours over Slack).
what this misses (and unfortunately is not always an option, especially in larger orgs) is that instead of talking (read: complaining), just fix the damn thing and present the solution on a platter (on company time, of course). more often than not, if you've already addressed the issue and it's ready for primetime, people will not refuse the change.
if they do, there's an equal chance that you either didn't understand the situation to begin with, or you work in a team with poor leadership and strategy. learn from the former, leave the latter.
This is terrible advice that will hurt your career progression. The problem isn't that people speak out too much. It's that basically no one is proactive enough to speak out. In my experience the people who speak are the people who get promoted.
Knowing when to shut up is great advice and knowing how the wind is blowing. If I know their is an edict from the top down to be an “AI first company”, no matter how much I disagree with an initiative that comes from on high, I’m going to shut up and be all in.
“The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.”
The last time I worked for a product company was as at a startup where I was the second technical hire by the then new CTO who was building up the technical staff internally. The founders bootstrapped the company through an outside consulting company.
There I had a relationship with the CTO where I could just say “that’s a really bad idea” and he would listen.
Fast forward a few years and I was working for a shitty consulting company, I kept my head down for a year, let them fail after I was sure they wouldn’t listen to me and started interviewing and only stayed a year.
My career progression isn’t dependent on the job I have at the moment.
[flagged]
"AI detectors" are snake oil. https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-wo...
What are your thoughts on the AI-generated image detectors?
Yes, but I wonder if learning that part of a paper is likely AI and part of it is likely not, might be a signal.
1. I determined the post was AI myself. The detector was merely to satisfy someone disingenuously asking for "proof".
2. This one works. It's peer-reviewed.
> This one works. It's peer-reviewed.
It may benchmark well, but in the wild none are much better than coin flip. A quick Google search shows that Pangram's weakness is "false positives on creative writing", and that it's trivially fooled.
Determined how?
By having native English language proficiency and an IQ above 100.
This isn't even particularly good slop. If you can't identify this, we're entering a not so good space.
Anyhow, I'd recommend you roll away from this hill because it's really not worth dying on. Common sense and peer reviewed slop detection aren't working for you. I provided my opinion and backed it with evidence. That's why I posted what I did.
Yes, it is, 100%. One does not even need an AI detector; it's obvious from the first sentence: "brought a lot of context, more scars, and more pattern recognition." "Like a lineman sees a frayed cable." Lol. This is the sloppiest slop there is.
But you got downvoted for pointing out that it was slop. I got similarly downvoted a couple days ago. Hackernews folk seem uninterested in having it pointed out when AI is being used to generate posts.
I'd guess it's some combination of a) they like using AI themselves, and b) they can't distinguish AI themselves. And they turn to all manner of excuse like "AI detectors do not work" or "non-native speakers need a way to produce articles, too". It's a crappy time to be a humanist, or really to care about anything, it seems.
[delayed]
> But you got downvoted for pointing out that it was slop. I got similarly downvoted a couple days ago. [...]
"A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle."
- Benjamin Franklin
That might be because the thing is whole-cloth generated from AI, but given that the author has a .in email address, it also might be that English is not their first language but they want to reach a broader audience with their message so they used AI to translate it into the lingua franca of modern technical and scientific discussion (which is, this is always funny to me, not franca).
AI generators do a better job of conversational output than traditional language translators (although there is a risk that if you can't read the target language as a non-native speaker, it can distort or destroy the message).
> the author has a .in email address
Indians write english just fine.
As someone struggling to learn a second language, I would have a lot more sympathy from someone using bad incorrect English than someone passing off AI Slop as their own.
Regardless, presenting AI generated content without the disclaimer *I AI GENERATED THIS CONTENT. IF YOU THINK MY MOST LIKELY BRIEF AND LOW-EFFORT PROMPT JUSTIFIES YOU READING POTENTIALLY LARGE AMOUNTS OF AI OUTPUT, CONTINUE* as if it's worth reading is something a lot of people aren't okay with.
I actually find it an insulting imposition on my time. I don't think this is unreasonable or even unusual.
[flagged]
How is something "obviously AI" for being written how you, a human, used to write?
They must be AI then
This contributed nothing to the conversation. Your AI divining rod isn't interesting.
And neither does AI slop. All it needs is a bunch of emojis and em dashes…